The Incidental Matters Rule and Judicially Created Exceptions to the Nebraska Public Meetings Law: A Call to the Legislature in \u3ci\u3eMeyer v. Board of Regents\u3c/i\u3e, 510 N.W.2d 450 (Neb. App. 1993)

This Note first addresses the facts of the Nebraska Court of Appeals decision in Meyer v. Board of Regents and then generally discusses the Nebraska Public Meetings Law. Specific holdings of Meyer are critiqued. The final parts of this Note consist of two features. First, in order to assist practitioners, the author suggests procedures for public entity negotiations that should avoid most Nebraska Public Meetings Law violations. Second, the author suggests that the holding in Meyer can best be explained by the court\u27s concern for the real-world consequences and dangerous precedential value that would have been set if the court would have invalidated the actions taken by the Board of Regents. In the final analysis, such result-oriented decision making is criticized, and the Nebraska Legislature is invited to take appropriate corrective action

The data acquisition system for the Anglo-Australian Observatory 2-degree field project

The Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO) is building a system that will provide a two-degree field of view at prime focus. A robot positioner will be used to locate up to 400 optical fibers at pre-determined positions in this field. While observations are being made using one set of 400 fibers, the robot will be positioning a second set of fibers in a background field that can be moved in to replace the first when the telescope is moved to a new position. The fibers feed two spectrographs each with a 1024 square CCD detector. The software system being produced to control this involves Vaxes for overall control and data recording, UNIX workstations for fiber configuration calculations and on-line data reduction, and VME systems running VxWorks for real-time control of critical parts such as the positioner robot. The system has to be able to interact with the observatory's present data acquisition systems, which use the ADAM system. As yet, the real-time parts of ADAM have not been ported to Unix, and so we are having to produce a smaller-scale system that is similar but inherently distributed (which ADAM is not). We are using this system as a testbed for ideas that we hope may eventually influence an ADAM II system. The system we are producing is based on a message system that is designed to be able to handle inter-process and inter-processor messages of any length, efficiently, and without ever requiring a task to block (i.e., be unresponsive to 'cancel' messages, enquiry messages), other than when deliberately waiting for external input - all of which will be through such messages. The essential requirement is that a message 'send' operation should never be able to block. The messages will be hierarchical, self-defining, machine-independent data structures. This allows us to provide very simple monitoring of messages for diagnostic purposes, and allows general purpose interface programs to be written without needing to share precise byte by byte message format definitions. Programs in this system have interfaces defined simply in terms of named actions and their parameters. Real-time control programs are required to be able to handle a number of such actions concurrently; data reduction programs will normally only need to handle one action at a time ('process an image', 'display a spectrum', etc)

AAO Starbugs: software control and associated algorithms

The Australian Astronomical Observatory's TAIPAN instrument deploys 150 Starbug robots to position optical fibres to accuracies of 0.3 arcsec, on a 32 cm glass field plate on the focal plane of the 1.2 m UK-Schmidt telescope. This paper describes the software system developed to control and monitor the Starbugs, with particular emphasis on the automated path-finding algorithms, and the metrology software which keeps track of the position and motion of individual Starbugs as they independently move in a crowded field. The software employs a tiered approach to find a collision-free path for every Starbug, from its current position to its target location. This consists of three path-finding stages of increasing complexity and computational cost. For each Starbug a path is attempted using a simple method. If unsuccessful, subsequently more complex (and expensive) methods are tried until a valid path is found or the target is flagged as unreachable.Comment: 10 pages, to be published in Proc. SPIE 9913, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy IV; 201

Evaluating Michigan's community hospital access: spatial methods for decision support

BACKGROUND: Community hospital placement is dictated by a diverse set of geographical factors and historical contingency. In the summer of 2004, a multi-organizational committee headed by the State of Michigan's Department of Community Health approached the authors of this paper with questions about how spatial analyses might be employed to develop a revised community hospital approval procedure. Three objectives were set. First, the committee needed visualizations of both the spatial pattern of Michigan's population and its 139 community hospitals. Second, the committee required a clear, defensible assessment methodology to quantify access to existing hospitals statewide, taking into account factors such as distance to nearest hospital and road network density to estimate travel time. Third, the committee wanted to contrast the spatial distribution of existing community hospitals with a theoretical configuration that best met statewide demand. This paper presents our efforts to first describe the distribution of Michigan's current community hospital pattern and its people, and second, develop two models, access-based and demand-based, to identify areas with inadequate access to existing hospitals. RESULTS: Using the product from the access-based model and contiguity and population criteria, two areas were identified as being "under-served." The lower area, located north/northeast of Detroit, contained the greater total land area and population of the two areas. The upper area was centered north of Grand Rapids. A demand-based model was applied to evaluate the existing facility arrangement by allocating daily bed demand in each ZIP code to the closest facility. We found 1,887 beds per day were demanded by ZIP centroids more than 16.1 kilometers from the nearest existing hospital. This represented 12.7% of the average statewide daily bed demand. If a 32.3 kilometer radius was employed, unmet demand dropped to 160 beds per day (1.1%). CONCLUSION: Both modeling approaches enable policymakers to identify under-served areas. Ultimately this paper is concerned with the intersection of spatial analysis and policymaking. Using the best scientific practice to identify locations of under-served populations based on many factors provides policymakers with a powerful tool for making good decisions

Characterization of H3N2 influenza viruses isolated from pigs in southern China

Poster Presentations: Animal Influenza EcologyHuman-like H3N2 influenza viruses have repeatedly transmitted to domestic pigs in different regions of the world, but it is still not certain whether any of those variants have become established in pig populations. The detection of different subtypes of avian influenza viruses from pigs makes it an ideal candidate for the genesis of a possible reassortant virus with both human and avian gene segments. However, whether pigs could act as a “mixing vessel” for a possible pandemic virus remains unanswered. Long-term influenza surveillance in pigs in southern China revealed that H3N2 influenza viruses were regularly detected from domestic pigs from 1998 to 2003. Antigenic analysis of representative strains revealed that two distinguishable groups of H3N2 influenza viruses were present in pigs during this period: a contemporary human-like viruses (represented by Sydney/5/97), and Port Chalmers/1/73-like (PC-like) viruses. Phylogenetic analysis of the representative strains confirmed those two groups. In general, the PC-like viruses were most closely related to those H3N2 reassortants recognized from European pigs since the mid-1980s, while the remaining isolates were most closely related to those contemporary human H3N2 viruses. It is interesting to note that one PC-like isolate contained a classical swine H1N1-like NP gene, Sw/HK/1197/02, suggesting that after introduction to pigs in southern China the European swine H3N2 virus further reassorted with local swine virus. The contemporary humanlike H3N2 viruses isolated from pig appeared to have resulted from repeated introduction from humans to pigs. Interestingly, one isolate (Sw/HK/NS1128/03) clustered with those human isolates detected in the early 1990s. These findings suggesting that some recent human H3N2 variants may be maintained long-term in pig populations in southern China. The present study provides updated information on the role of pigs in the interspecies transmission and genetic reassortment of influenza viruses in this region.postprin

A comparison of the CAM-ICU and the NEECHAM Confusion Scale in intensive care delirium assessment: an observational study in non-intubated patients

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